Sarah Steimel

Creating and Responding to the Gen(d)eralized Other: Women Miners' Community-Constructed Identities

An analysis of interviews with mining families reveals that gender identity construction is a collaborative process that draws upon broader community discourses. Male miners and non-mining women created a generalized other for women as “unfit to mine” (i.e., women are physically too weak to mine, are easy prey, and are ladies who do not belong in the mines). Female miners responded with gendered discourses that distanced themselves from and linked themselves to the generalized other.

Connecting with Volunteers: Memorable Messages and Volunteer Identification

Many of the 1.8 million registered nonprofit organizations in the United States rely on the services of volunteers to be able to connect with and meaningfully serve their communities. However, volunteers are less likely to receive formal socialization and training than paid employees. Thus, this study employs the concept of memorable messages as a way for exploring the ways in which messages received by volunteers from a variety of organizational sources may affect their volunteer identification with the nonprofit organization they serve. Three results emerged from the data, including: (a) sources of memorable messages in volunteer organizations; (b) types of memorable messages in volunteer organizations; and (c) a significant relationship between memorable message type and level of volunteer identification. Implications for connecting with volunteers and for future research are explored.

Negotiating Refugee Empowerment(s) in Resettlement Organizations

ABSTRACT In-depth interviews with both organizational staff and refugee clients in two American refugee resettlement organizations explore how empowerment is communicated to and understood by refugees being “empowered.” This study found that while organizational staff professed empowerment focused on self-sufficiency as self-determination, in practice their communication to clients defined self-sufficiency a priori in economic terms. Refugee clients instead constructed empowerment(s) in economic, educational, personal, and family terms. These findings highlight the need for changes in U.S. resettlement policy and for theoretical and practical understandings of refugee empowerment to recognize polysemic and conflicting empowerments in different life arenas and from different positionalities.

Negotiating knowledges and expertise in refugee resettlement organizations

Abstract Interviews with both refugees and organizational staff in two nonprofit refugee resettlement organizations in the United States reveal the ways in which knowledge(s) and expertise are crafted, threatened, and understood in refugee organizations. Refugee-participants described the need for knowledgeable communication, barriers to the communication of knowledge, and processes of negotiating whose expertise is involved. Organizational staff participants described the duty of communicating expert knowledge, the limits of knowledge as expertise, and alternative communications of expertise. These tensions surrounding “knowing” in refugee resettlement organizations highlights the need for a more complex theoretical understanding of the processes of knowing present in refugee resettlement. These tensions also suggest areas in which refugee resettlement agencies and other nonprofit staff can make on-the-ground changes to better facilitate refugee resettlement processes.

Core beliefs/content accommodation policies and teaching practice

ABSTRACT After nearly five years of litigation and public debate, the University of Utah now follows a Content Accommodations policy that outlines how students may ask for university curriculum to be altered based on their sincerely held beliefs. This essay is written about experiences teaching at another public university in Utah (Weber State), which has a similar Core Beliefs policy written in the aftermath of the University of Utah lawsuit. Teaching under a core beliefs policy has resulted in at least three notable influences on my own teaching practices: tensions between planning and spontaneity, vagaries surrounding reasonable accommodation, and pre-curation (or self-censorship) strategies.